


The Lighthouse Keepers

by LadyVisenya



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (sometimes), Additional Characters to be added, F/M, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Number Five | The Boy Being an Asshole, Number Five | The Boy in an Adult Body, Time Loop, Time Travel, an exploration into what a love interest would five would work, five has a type and its fashion loving bad bitches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28403895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyVisenya/pseuds/LadyVisenya
Summary: Remy Nguyen has-will-is going to know Five Hargreeves all her life. Five doesn't spend all of the years it takes him to get back to his family alone.
Relationships: Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz, Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	1. Pleasantville

**Author's Note:**

> not me starting another fic. i had a complete outline ready to go in my writing folders so here it is.

Thuy Nguyen drove home from work the same way she has for the last eighty nine years. She was over one hundred but looked exactly the same as she had since joining the Temps Commission. There was only one road that led to a company town that was a pastel little haven right out of the 1950s. Like most temps workers, outside of the agents, she lived and worked without divination. There was one grocery store, one diner, one department store, and the sole form of entertainment: a theater in the style of the vaunderville shows with each room having a variation of movies and live entertainment. 

She got into her car, drove, and for the first time in decades, wished for a drug store. There were other ways to know: the rounded curve to her stomach too low to be from her diet, the nausea she'd had as of late in the mornings though she'd yet to throw up, and of course, the unadvisable tryst she'd had with one of the switchboard operators. 

Months later, she couldn't remember what his name had been. Time was strange in this town: a byproduct of the commission. 

Thuy picked out her usual from the diner, refusing to deviate from her schedule as she fought the urge to check if she was being followed by any agents, and went home. She went home and starred in the mirror. 

No doubt about it. She was pregnant. It didn't bother her too much. The 60s had been wild; there wasn't much she hadn't done with men and women, but as far as she could tell, having secured a pass under the pretense of research, there had been no children born in a time loop. 

She wasn't stupid. 

There had to be other accidental pregnancies. The commission had solved that problem in some form. 

Thuy places her hand on the slight curve, heart already filling with love for her unborn child. She wanted it, loved the idea of nurturing life in a way she hadn't imagined she would ever want when she was in college smoking grass until her brain fried. 

None of her actions could look suspicious. 

Even if she wanted to cut and run, they would find her. The Temps had all of time to search for her, and the best assassins of all time. No one got away. 

Not the Swedes who were family in a way that was unfamiliar to Thuy, whose parents had only ever pushed her and ignored her. The brothers were all love and support and how they ended up assassins was anyone's guess. 

Not even the legendary Five, who often came in and screamed at lead developer Le Prince, until the assassin was red-faced. 

There was no way she, a thin scientist whose only exercise was the stairs at work, would be able to pull it off. No, instead she would turn in her resignation letter to her department head. 

The development of bulletproof briefcases would be paused until a suitable replacement could be found. That was of no concern to her now. 

She would take herself and her child, take one of the one way briefcases that self-destructed, and slip into the time stream. 

Her child would never know the Temps Commission or time travel or the overbearing stress lumped onto her by parents expecting straight A’s. There would be no record of the baby. 

The Temps would never know. 

They would be safe. 

They would be a family. 

But for now, she would watch disney movies and eat french fries.

  
  



	2. i'll be your flophouse

Five slips into a diner. It's a shithole. But then, everything is during this period of New York City, especially so close to the flophouses. They've exploded across the city. 

It's still better than the absolute trash that the Hooverville in Central Park has dissolved into. 

He's only just arrived in 1931. 

The target is some irish woman who could go on to start an entire communist revolution in the united states of America. Brona O’Malley. 19. She was in one of the Hoovervilles. 

It shouldn't be that hard. The mission file stated she was already part of the communist party. They tended to stick together. 

Personally, Five thought, as he ordered a coffee and whatever muffin was leftover at this time of night, america could use some strong unions. But he that could just be his unresolved issues with his father rearing their ugly head. 

Sir Reginald was an astute businessman, but hardly a kind man. 

The waitress sets a mug of coffee down, a tin full of sugar. and milk down in front of him without batting an eye. He's almost fifty, and has not aged particularly well. 

Years in the apocalypse had taken their toll on his body. 

“I wouldn't drink the milk,” a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, tells him, taking a seat. She's obviously asian, with tanned skin, and eyes the color of a full roast coffee. Her hair falls down past her shoulders in waves and Five is smiling despite himself, even as his fingers twitch, remembering where his gun was hidden. Remy.

She looks exactly the same as she looked in 1906. . .swanning about San Francisco trying to stop the plague: even down to the smile lines around her full mouth. 

She sits down next to him, resting her arm against the counter. 

“Why,” he asks, raising a brow. 

“Milk hasn't been regulated well yet,” she shrugs, seemingly unbothered by the looks she was getting. 

“What are you doing here,” he asks. She always found him, no matter the time period. 

She always appears without rhyme or reason. He's tried to do regressions on it without wasting too much time when he has to be figuring out how to stop the apocalypse. Then he'd have all the time in the world to solve the mystery of this time traveling girl. 

“Not sure,” she admits, taking the coffee cup for herself. “Just seemed like a year,” she says with an impish grin. “Guess I'll see where the wind takes me.”

Which was bullshit, Five can't help but think, considering how crapshoot his time traveling abilities were and how dependent he was on the Temps briefcases. 

Here's Remy, rolling about time like it was a car she could drive at will. It reminded him of his free spirit brother Klaus. 

Still, he wasn't willing to bring the Handler down on the girls head. She's flown under the Temps radar for this long; it was for the best. 

“Who's the target,” Remy asks, looking around the diner.

Five rips the cup of coffee out of her hands. “Give me that.” 

“So,” she asks, leaning in close to him, with a familiarity he doesn't reciprocate. Time travel. Five wasn’t entirely concerned with her; she was harmless. 

Still, he wasn't at ease with people getting this close: not Dot’s waves when she spotted him before handing him another file, not with the way the Handler found every excuse to be near with featherlight touches that he felt hours later, not even with Remy’s thoughtless gestures that merged his personal space with hers. The apocalypse. It always came back to that. 

It had been over a year since he'd gotten out, but it was all Five could think about. 

“Just maintaining the state of things,” he says blandly. 

Remy rolls her eyes, before the easy smile on her lips sharpens into a smirk, “isn't the natural state of things to slowly fall into chaos. Entropy.”

Five shakes his head, eye twitching at the improper application of science. The worst offender was social darwinism. “You can't apply laws of nature and science to the behavior of sentient beings. Besides, I am merely a messenger.”

“Not a very nice messenger,” she points out with a grin. 

The waitress comes back. She blinks at the sight of Remy. “Um,” and then does the very american thing of speaking very loudly when they think a person can't understand their language. “HELLO.”

Five frowns, eye twitching as he remembers why he can't just kill anyone who just happened to step on his toes. Too many bodies.

She cringes, before replying to the waitress, “do you have. . .um, actually I'm good.” 

The waitress nods, then goes back to gawking at Remy. 

“You can go now,” Five snaps, feeling annoyed at the way the young woman was looking at Remy. 

The waitress sheepishly nods, and goes to serve someone else. 

“Well. . .,” Remy says, looking at her nails, “I'd forgotten this is practically a food desert. Not the biggest fan of Idaho, but there's no fear of getting arsenic in my milk there.”

“You're off then,” he asks, stumbling in conversation. Five wasn't often in a situation where he had to make small talk, but for this one constant in his life that wasn't in the business of fucking him in the ass, he could try. 

Something in her eyes dims. Remy sits back, slumping in her chair. 

Five’s got no clue what could elicit that response from her. 

He didn't even insult her. Not even close.

It's the first time he really looks at her, takes all of her in, from the sneakers that haven't been invented yet to the mint green dress that hugs her curves, emphasizing the bust that Five really shouldn't be looking at like that, it that wouldn't look out of place in a rococo painting, the hem raw and cutoff around her calf (too short for the time period), and black velvet jacket. He forgets sometimes the effect she has on him. 

Only Delores has ever teased such emotions out of him, and that took decades between meeting and getting to know each other. 

Remy looks around the room as if she's just realized what a dump it is. 

Before he can call her out on it, she smiles, “Well,” she looks around the place, “I think I'll take a trip down to latin american before the coups ruin it all. . .” 

He shrugs, looking around for a newspaper. 

“See you around Five,” she says in such a soft voice. 

He has no clue what he's done, what he will do, to make her so terribly fond of him. His own siblings drove him up the walls, and he drove them crazy too. The Umbrella Academy could barely stand each other. 

What he wouldn't give for another second with them. 

Soon. 

He was biding his time. Patience was a virtue. And he'd learned all about patience in the apocalypse. 

Five’s hand reaches for his pocket, fingers running over the prosthetic eye. 

When he looks up, Remy’s vanished into the night. 

He should've asked her to search through the Hoovervilles with him. Two was better than one when he needed to find a group of communists in a city of millions. 

And he would have liked company he wasn't going to kill later on. 

Murder got boring after a while.

  
  



	3. tucked away in time

“Remy,” Thuy shouts out the door. “Remy grab me some carrots from the cellar.” They stuck out in this tiny village, asian and two women alone, but as soon as they settled in, one woman approached, then they asked if Thuy knew where the creek to wash clothes was, and then they were gossiping and not strangers even if they remained outsiders. 

It was hard finding a place to settle down in. All countries were ravished by wars; it was a matter of finding lesser evils. 

“Coming mother,” Remy shouts, racing through the door, stopping only to kick her shoes off before heading for the kitchen. She was a wonderful child. Much easier than Thuy remembers herself being, but also happier and livelier and Thuy is alright with forgoing electricity and modern vaccines in exchange for her daughter. 

“Chop them up, thinly.”

Remington Nguyen, the spitting image of her mother save for the richness of her skin and her lips which were laughing more often than not, nods, grabbing the knife. 

“Wash them first,” Thuy scolds, tossing some oil into the pan. 

She does, biting her lip as she tries to keep her hand steady. 

“Mother,” her daughter asks.

“Mmm.” Thuy adds the spices to the oil. It was a bit hard to get the foods of her childhood here in Canada, but she was finding substitutes so her daughter would know them too. 

“Who are the men coming here?”

Fear shoots into her heart. The Temps, was her first thought. There was no way-they had somehow found out! 

Remy hands her the cut up carrots, adding, “I don't think they know how cold it is. But her dress was pretty,” she practically sighs. Out in their village, the silk skirts and fine heels make no sense. 

Thuy feels the fear loosen its hold on her chest; it wasn't the Temps. They didn't bother blending in. That was why sightings existed at all, rumors spread too thin to put together. 

“You saw them walking by?” She asks her daughter.

Remy shrugs. “When are we going to make more noodles?”

“When we run out,” Thuy laughs, patting Remy’s hair. She must have seen the group walking by outside. 

She can't bring herself to look outside--in case she's wrong. 

  
  


Remy is ten. She lives in a tiny house with her mom but that's more space then the O’Briens have with twelve of them and only two rooms. Even the Douglases only have three rooms and one is their store even though it’s just the three of them and everyone says they have money since they’re the closest store so you have to buy from them. Anne says that Theordore Douglas will go to school in the city and Remy wishes that was her. 

She wants to go to school, but her mom homeschools her. She says its better, but she can’t talk about viruses and bacteria and radiation and germ theory and. . .and. . .there’s lots of things she can’t talk about. Like the bottle of penicillin in the root cellar, or the gold bars that her mom has buried just in case, or the history lessons she goes into which are funny because her mom will talk about things that haven’t happened. 

But she won’t talk about Remy’s dad. 

She had to have one. 

James and Elliot told everyone how babies are made while they were all playing instead of helping Mrs. O’Brien can. Remy’s mom is bad at canning so she does it with Mrs. O’Brien. 

Then there’s the loose floorboard that mom says never to move, and even put the mattress over it for good measure. Which was dumb in Remy’s opinion because what happens if she needs something from there. 

But it’s alright, she’s pretty sure everyone has secrets. 

Sometimes, she accidently sees them. Like when she knew Laura Pritchard was going to get very very sick from sneaking around with Father Thomas, but her mom made her swear not to say because people shouldn't know. Then Laura Pritchard died even though Remy knew some of the penicillin gunk would have saved her but mom didn’t do anything and that’s when Remy started wondering if mom really knew everything.

Oh, that’s another thing she can’t talk about. The things she sees. 

They’re short simple things,sometimes as vague as the color of a dress, sometimes the wrinkled face of a woman smiling in the sun. Too often, they’re not worth bothering her mom about and causing her to worry. 

  
  


Remy is fourteen. A woman as Mrs. O’Brien would say even when Mrs.Douglas shakes her head and tells Remy to take her time. The thing about living in a small town is that everyone knows everyone. 

The thing about living in a small town is mom and her are the only vietnamese even though mom lets people call them chinese to their face. She also explained to Remy that vietnam is indochina which makes no sense to her. France has finally regained its footing in the world; it’s not about to let its colonies slip out of their grasp. 

Sometimes she wonders if her mom is a bit odd with her fanciful history of things to come in the future. 

“Remy,” Elliot says, bumping her knee against hers. “I can see it,” he yells, pointing to the growing city on the horizon. City is a bit of a stretch compared to somewhere like New York or London, which she’s never seen but read about,but this is the largest town a day's ride from her hometown. 

James rolls his eyes, thinking himself too self important now that he’s sixteen and started farming a plot of land. Similarly, Rose has her nose stuck in the air, wearing her sunday church dress. At seventeen, Rose is engaged to a man in this town. Remy doesn’t know him, only knows that Rose is leaving and going to live in well. . .practically a city. One with a library and shops full of everything you could possibly want. 

Remy is only here to buy some things for the planting season. Whatever needs to be supplemented. She smiles widely anyway, matching Elliot’s grin with her own, “I can smell it too.”

That makes him burst out laughing. 

“Don’t smile like that,” Rose chastises, “it’s not ladylike. A woman’s smile should be demure.”

“Shut up Rose,” Elliot says, rolling his eyes, “Remy’s not old and smelly like you.”

Remy has to smother a laugh. 

James eyes her, “Rose is right you know. That way you’ll have your pick of husbands.”

She wrinkles her nose, “I’d rather not. I want to go to the city. Go to university and see the world.”

Even Elliot looks skeptically at her. 

But she knows her mother’s a learned woman. Surely, if men could fly in contraptions, and people’s likeness could be captured with machines, she could go to a university like Theodore Douglas had gone. 

It’s all forgotten as soon as they arrive at Rose’s fiance’s house. It’s nicer than any house she’s ever seen. 

While out shopping and purchasing boring things like dried fruit and as much chili flakes as fit into the jar she’d brought, Ernest Collins suggests going to a photography shop which is a, “splendid idea really,” Rose says, fluttering her eyelashes delicately. 

Remy had no clue where Rose had learned to act so ladylike. All the women in the woods were strong the way she bears were strong to protect their young and survive the harsh landscape. 

“I thought you might like it,” Ernest says, as the couple walks ahead of them, “Was sure that photographers don’t go out so far. . .to underdeveloped land.”

Remy wrinkles her nose. A photographer had come by once. Only the Douglases had commissioned portraits. She’d glimpsed them once, when she’d gone over to leave cooked noodles that Mrs. Douglas had bought from them. 

She blinks and hears the horrible sound of horses screeching and bones shattering. She blinks and it’s gone. A vision. 

She looks around as James O’Brien takes a step off the pavement onto the manure covered street and suddenly she just knows what’s going to happen, dread filling her bones up, weighing them down so that she’s rooted in place. No. No. No. 

Like a rope snapping, Remy burts forward, grabbing Jame’s sleeve as he turns and she can hear the horses pounding down the stretch, pulling a carriage too fast to stop.

“James watch out,” Elliot’s yelling from somewhere behind her. 

Rose is gasping, and Remy’s pulling hard. 

James knocks them both onto the pavement. 

Her knees sting as she looks around and Rose is clutching her brother, “oh thank the lord you’re alright!”

And then Elliot’s helping her up, “good catch Remy,” he says. 

She smiles, trying to brush off the queasy feeling in her stomach. Not even her strange mother had visions. 

  
  


Remy is 17 and rolling out the dough that will soon be noodles for their pho, when her mother asks her, “Theodore is in town,” she tells Remy, too carefully for it to be natural. 

She tenses. Only last year she had to turn James down. At sixteen she felt like more of a girl than a future wife. And she hated the idea that wife seemed to be the end goal here. 

She could see things before they happened. 

Didn’t that mean there was more for her than a husband and kids? 

“Oh,” she shrugs off. Remy would rather talk about space time and time stopping at theoretical zero kelvin. She wanted to run off to Europe and learn from Einstein. She wanted to run off to Vancouver and become a nurse. She wanted to run off and do everything. 

“He just opened his own law practice,” her mother says in the same tone she used to sell dried noodles, “and was asking Victoria to move to the city with him.”

Remy nods. “It makes sense. His parents are getting on in their years and don’t have help.” It wasn’t the same to have a family look in on them from time to time. 

“You know Victoria feels better in the fresh country air,” her mother says. 

“The city reeks.” 

“He asked after you.”

She wrinkles her nose, having expected it as she takes a knife and slices into the dough. Her noodles were never as pinstraight as her mothers. She preferred to make potstickers and have fun with the shape of them. 

Of course. Marriage. To a lawyer. What more could she wish for according to everyone around her. 

“You could have him,” her mother adds, as if Remy didn’t understand anything. She can do maths just fine. Not nearly as well as her mother, but addition and division come easily from hours of practice working equations out in the loamy soil behind their house. “In a year or two when he establishes his practice well enough to support a family.”

She simply nods. 

Remy dreams of skies without stars and sees a bright red that’s almost pink. She moves the mattress she shares with her mother just so, just so that she can hear the click of the loose floorboard. 

She deweeds their garden, and the freshly turned soil in the summer sun reminds her of a man’s hair she’s never seen before. Remy flips through the books the Douglases have for sale as she stands there, listening to her mom and Victoria talk and pointedly mention Theodore. The mansions remind her so strongly of a monkey. 

She reads her worn copy of Pride and Prejudice after she’s done sweeping and dusting, as the wind flutters the drying clothes, and she can practically smell coffee in the air. 

Her visions ensured she knew there was more. 

And while the handful of times she’d met Theodore, nearly a decade her elder, he was alright. She felt nothing. 

It’s not hard at all to corner Elliot O’Brien when they’re supposed to be cutting down the wheat harvest in a field with grasses taller than them. He makes her laugh, and she doesn’t love him, but she takes him in the cool autumn breeze all the same, kissing him with her mouth clumsily, parting her skirts and meeting his hips with hers. 

Her childhood friend throws his head back in the grass, shutting his eyes as he clutches at her. 

Then he cums and Remy’s left wondering what all the fuss was about. If that was all there was to it, she saw no urgent need to get married. 

She goes home hours later, after she’s actually harvested some, and tells her mom because she knows all about medical stuff, “I’m ruined. I slept with Elliot today,” in a far off voice. She keeps waiting for the shoe to drop and some magical change happen to her, a scarlet A to thread itself to her clothes, but she feels no different from the woman she was yesterday.

Her mother raises a brow. “You could’ve just said you didn’t want to marry Theodore.”

Remy shrugs, changing into her nightgown and reaching for the wool stockings, “I wanted to know why everyones rushing to get married.”

“And?”

“I don’t get it.” 

Her mom laughs so hard, tears slip out of her eyes. “In that case you should’ve gone to Theodore. Boys. . .” she shakes her head. “Useless.” Then she gives her some herbs so she doesn’t end up pregnant. 

For a second. Remy feels like a child, soothed by her mothers ministrations, confident her mother would make everything alright. But Laura had died. 

She lies awake thinking of the loose floorboard. 

“Who was my father,” Remy asks. Nineteen and aggressively avoiding Elliot who’s turned into a stuttering mess around her as of late. Boys were useless indeed. 

“Some man,” her mother waves off. “I don’t remember. We worked together.”

“Where?”

The lines on her mother’s face look especially deep in that moment. “Back when I was a scientist. In the old country.” She means Vietnam, which won’t exist for another few decades if her mom’s to be believed. 

Remy frowns, but lets it go. It wasn’t really about her father. 

That night her mother is called to help midwife James’ wife. This'll be her second child. It should be easier than the first and Remy takes it as a sign to finally lift the floor board. 

The floorboard creaks, but it takes some sweat for it to finally open up. It’s been years then, since her mother looked at whatever she hid underneath. A contraption, a machine. 

It’s a briefcase, thick like one used for travelling. 

She drags it out onto the floor.

The lockes click open but it seems to only look like a suitcase because it doesn't crack open. She presses buttons and nothing happens. 

In front of her, the briefcase remains unchanged, a broken machine. But in her mind’s eye she feels the button click on the handle, the tiny dot flash red, before the space around her crackles with blue lightning. Short bursts of lightning that don’t fry her. 

Remy swallows, looking around. 

Her mom will be gone for ages. 

It’s okay. 

She can’t remember a time she didn’t see visions from the future, from her future because she’s seen a ballgown at least once, of the days gone by, or something that only monarchies in europe can afford. There’s no reason she can’t just reach-

Remy bites her lip, her hand curling around the briefcase handle. She feels stupid, like a child wishing on stars, but she closes her eyes tightly and imagines the briefcase button working like it had in her vision, she wills it so hard her fingers hurt from digging into the handle. 

When you wish upon a star,

Doesn’t matter who you are, 

Remy opens her eyes, and presses the button. 

Blue flashes around her for less than a second, and everything around her vanishes, replaced before she can take stock, by forests so thick she can’t see the sun overhead. 

A native girl drops her basket, long dark hair glittering like obsidian in the lowlight. 

A second later, an arrow stabs the briefcase, startling Remy so hard she drops the machine. 

Fuck. 


End file.
